In 3GPP Long-Term Evolution (LTE) networks, an evolved universal terrestrial radio access network (E-UTRAN) includes a plurality of base stations, e.g., evolved Node-Bs (eNBs) communicating with a plurality of mobile stations referred as user equipment (UEs). Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) has been selected for LTE downlink (DL) radio access scheme due to its robustness to multipath fading, higher spectral efficiency, and bandwidth scalability. Multiple access in the downlink is achieved by assigning different sub-bands (i.e., groups of subcarriers, denoted as resource blocks (RBs)) of the system bandwidth to individual users based on their existing channel condition. In LTE networks, Physical Downlink Control Channel (PDCCH) is used for dynamic downlink scheduling. Typically, PDCCH can be configured to occupy the first one, two, or three OFDM symbols in a subframe.
One promising technology for LTE is the use of Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) antennas that can further improve the spectral efficiency gain by using spatial division multiplexing. Multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) is considered in LTE Rel-10. To enable MU-MIMO, individual control signaling must be indicated to each UE via PDCCH. As a result, more PDCCH transmissions are expected, as the number of scheduled UEs per subframe will increase. However, the maximum 3-symbol PDCCH region may not be enough to accommodate the increased number of UEs in LTE. Due to limited control channel capacity, the MIMO performance degrades because of non-optimized MU-MIMO scheduling.
LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) system improves spectrum efficiency by utilizing a diverse set of base stations deployed in a heterogeneous network topology. Using a mixture of macro, pico, femto and relay base stations, heterogeneous networks enable flexible and low-cost deployments and provide a uniform broadband user experience. In a heterogeneous network (HetNet), smarter resource coordination among base stations, better base station selection strategies and more advance techniques for efficient interference management can provide substantial gains in throughput and user experience as compared to a conventional homogeneous network. For example, coordinated multiple points (CoMP) transmission/reception, also known as multi-BS/site MIMO, is used to enhance the performance of cell-edge UEs in LTE-Rel-11. CoMP creates a control channel capacity problem similar to the MU-MIMO situation illustrated above.
To address the control channel capacity problem, an UE-specific downlink scheduler for MU-MIMO/CoMP has been proposed. In LTE, it extends the PDCCH design to a new ePDCCH, which is in the legacy Physical Downlink Shared Channel (PDSCH). The main benefits to have this new physical control channel are for the better support of HetNet, CoMP, and MU-MIMO. Based on ePDCCH design spanning in both first and second slots in the region of legacy PDSCH, it is desirable to design the physical structure of ePDCCH to support both distributed and localized transmission to exploit either diversity or beamforming gain. In order to minimize the control overhead, resource utilization gain needs to be enhanced and multiplexing physical resource for both distributed and localized transmission of ePDCCH in one physical resource block (PRB) may be necessary.
Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) is a Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) radio technology standard that has been developed to enable a wide range of devices and services to be connected using cellular telecommunications bands. NB-IoT is a narrowband radio technology designed for the Internet of Things (IoT), and is one of a range of Mobile IoT (MIoT) technologies standardized by the 3GPP. The physical structure of physical downlink control channel for NB-IoT needs to be addressed.